134 Poetry and Contemplation

to whom or to which our activity relates. We shall look in
vain, then, for a reconciliation of the conflict, to olr simple
consciousness of living. The doctrines are born of abstract
thought, and, if they are to be reconciled at all, it can only be
through further conceptual thinking. And if the thinking
were successful, as it never was with Coleridge, it would lead
to a single new doctrine, bearing likenesses to each of the
conflicting doctrines, acceptable to the imagination, and
capable of being stated in prose.

In many poems, of course, the prose meaning Is tenuous,
elusive, unimportant. Here we do not look for logical
consistency; indeed a mad inconsequence of thought, or
a queer mingling of logic and absurdity, may be an
excellent basis for a poem of nightmare emotion. But
the more intellectual the structure of the poem, the more
do we require that the thought should be coherent, or
at least that there should be 'some one predominant
thought*. Such passages from Coleridge as those quoted
above are highly intellectual, challenging the reader to
think. And the reader, so challenged, cannot ignore the
presence in them of two unreconciled views of Nature.
The experience of the passages has value; for each doc-
trine is accompanied by its own exciting images and
emotions and, where the doctrines conflict, those attendant
upon one are at least partially fused with those attendant
upon the other. But that is not the same thing as a fusiOE
of the doctrines themselves, or of the whole content' of
the mind. The conflict of doctrines is sufficient in sopte
; • -degree to baffle the imagination in its struggle * to idealize1
'/'and to unify*. There is, in this degree, a definite
'in': the poetry.,